Creating waves in the new tech world, 29-year-old Kannan Chandrasekaran from IIT Hyderabad bagged a whopping cash prize of ₹150,000 at the Samsung Innovation Awards 2018.

Chandrasekaran won the first prize at the event for his self-learning bot that can read through and understand data in an extremely short time. The robot is also reportedly smart enough to provide responses for questions asked about that data in any form or language, making it easy for users to find information in an easy manner.

Named Irene, the robot works on natural language processing and can decode any information and respond in human language. Media reports have said that Irene can communicate in over 20 different languages, including, Kannada and Tamil.

Chandrasekaran told a newspaper in an interview, “I have created Irene with an aim to rescue the bot framework. There are many bots available these days but most of them perform ‘look-up’ functions. For instance, ‘tell me a joke’, ‘show me news’ are some of the most common commands these assistants can perform and the bot loos up for relevant things and presents it to the user. But Irene will generate the text dynamically on its own. It will self-learn from the information and analyse data to generate unique queries.”

Chandrasekaran’s project was pitted against 21 strong ideas during the Samsung Innovation Awards. The winning projects were selected based on the degree of implementation of the proposal, prototype implementation, final product realization, the business/market impact and the demo.

“Since its inception eight years ago, Samsung Innovation Awards have witnessed highly creative solutions with great technological and social applications. Bright young minds of the country need to choose impactful problems, think of innovative solutions and pursue step-by-step implementation. This year too, students of IIT-Hyderabad have submitted powerful ideas that made shortlisting winners a difficult yet delightful challenge. Samsung has been supporting deep-tech innovation over the years and we believe such opportunities alongside joint courses and emerging technology labs at top institutions will help take our vision forward,” said Dr Aloknath De, Senior Vice President, Samsung R&D Institute, India, Bangalore.

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Prajakta is a Writer/Editor/Social Media diva. Lover of all that is 'quaint', her favourite things include dogs, Starbucks, butter popcorn, Jane Austen novels and neo-noir films. She has previously worked for HuffPost, CNN IBN, The Indian Express and Bose.